redemption

The day was going down.

I sat in the cafe with Rowena.

We were talking.

I was explaining how I felt that newspapers and media were using sex abuse as a tool in their culture war against the Catholic Church while deliberately ignoring the vast majority of most serious and ongoing abuse cases which involved no religious people and were therefore utterly useless as propaganda.

Suddenly Rowena said: "James, I was abused."

I went quiet.

She said: "It was my father. He was alcoholic. I kept it secret for years. I never even told my sisters. I was going to kill myself a while ago. Your friend Bob Jones met me coming out of church. He didn't know me. I was crying. I was going straight to the river to end it all. He stopped me and asked me to pray with him. He saved my life. God must have sent him. Afterwards I was able to forgive my father. I nursed him for months when he was dying. I was genuinely able to forgive him. At the very end just before he died he took my hand and said: I'm sorry. Those were his last words. Then he died. The priest who was there didn't know what he had meant by I'm sorry. But I knew. I was so overjoyed to have been with him and to have nursed him right to the end. Can you understand that? For the very first time he was my father and I was his daughter and nothing else."

I weighed her words.

I said: "Rowena I have to ask you very humbly. Do you think I'm wrong when I say that the media are using sex abuse to destroy the church? Do you think I'm wrong when I say that they are ignoring most of the more serious victims?"

She shook her head.

She said: "I don't think you're wrong. But I'm glad it's all come out. And I do think Archbishop Diarmuid Martin is a good man."

These are her words as she said them.

I did not contradict her although you all know I have for a long time believed Archbishop Diarmuid Martin represents a liberal leftist infiltration of the church and is malignly ascribing criminality to Bishops he wants to ruin as part of a cynical bid to remake the ancient faith in his own image.

Rowena told me some more things.

I held her words in my heart.

She finished with: "You're one of the few people I've shared this with."

She left me.

I would not contradict her.

Yet she herself had never willingly revealed the name of her abuser.

She had never gone to the police.

Maybe because she had no wish to publicly humiliate him.

Maybe because she didn't want to hurt other family members.

After what she believes was God's intervention to stop her taking her own life, she had forgiven her abuser and nursed him on his deathbed.

For her own reasons she had never denounced him.

A Bishop or a priest behaving with similar discretion and concern for the reputation of an individual or a family, would now be labelled as a concealer of child abuse.

There was rain on the windows of the cafe.

It was dark outside.

I got up to leave.

Sick at heart, and desolate of soul, I wandered out into the wasteland.